I saw a video of a doggo on the internet today. Since there’s never been a doggo video on the internet before, I’ll wait here while you watch it.

Anyway, I was struck by a very visceral memory of being exactly where those dogs are, on the Bonneville salt flats (where they test land speed records and film car commercials).

I remembered the washed-out, dried-up grey earth that crumbled into footprints and smeared into dust. A harsh sea tang to the dry desert air and salt-crusted tires to match. My father, taking Dutch angle photographs of the family’s hair whipped wild by the wind.

We camped there for one night, alone on the flats. I was probably 13. I woke up to relieve myself and slipped out under a clear sky blooming with stars. The half-moon made it feel like half-day, like God had left the light on in Heaven’s hallway.

As I walked as far from the tent as I dared, I could tell things were watching me, sand spirits and desert beings, beady-eyed lizards and bugs.

The silvery soil sported a jagged network of lines across the entire flat, like flattened lightning. The cracks were deep enough to slide my fingers in as I tried to anchor myself to the world, lest I float away with the ghosts.

I’m sitting down with a “Now Write!” exercise book for speculative fiction (thank you, Half Price Books!) in front of me, and I’m having a little writercrisis.

See, I love brainstorming. And taking notes. And organizing those notes. And then brainstorming based on the incidental connections firing in my imagination.

But I guess I don’t really let myself call that “writing.”

As I was doing one of these exercises, I got that grippy hoarding feeling at the top of my stomach. (what? you don’t get that when you suddenly have an overflowing of ideas and want NO ONE ELSE TO KNOW ABOUT THEM until you have a chance to make them AMAZING for YOURSELF?! …oh. just me then.)

I started to think about all of the notes I wanted to write about these goofy composite ideas (The Lion King, but with aliens! and so on). And I realized I was about to chastise myself for wasting my time on more notes when what I really could be doing is writing another novel and…

SHUT UP, ME.

No. Seriously. Hold up. What about this, me? Try this on for size:

What if by brainstorming whichever random idea I want to brainstorm about, I develop a bunch of ideas to the point that I just. can’t. NOT. write. the stories?

Until recently, I would start the process of creating a character by addressing a need: a genre need (like “strong heroine,” “handsome lover,” “funny sidekick”), a plot need (such as “someone to give my hero advice”), or a world need (as in “this stable needs a groom”). Then I would sketch out the vaguest outline of a character, and fill in the details as they became relevant.

As you might imagine, one-dimensional characters were a hallmark of my early stories.

KC the kitty cat’s entire thing was being stubborn and hating his name. Willow the otter could be (and often was) summed up in two words: steady leader. Ata, griffon-riding warrior that she was, only ever expressed herself by swearing in gibberish (Wu zxy Sohn!).

Much to my chagrin, I’ve never been one of those writers to whom full-fledged characters present themselves, ready to be written. (I envy my dear friend Jill for having this particular writertrait.) Instead, I have to hunt them down and make them reveal themselves.

Because I wasn’t very good at hunting them down, every line my characters used to utter sounded wooden and hammy. It isn’t uncommon to find lines like this scattered throughout my largest complete manuscript: “Then if it be the will of those whose bodies are not whole…I will allow it.” Blegh. Nope.

While I was writing Daugment, trying to capture Pitney’s reaction to a well-intended but ill-timed gesture, a realization sort of struck me. (Sort of, because every good writing book I ever read probably mentioned it somewhere, and it took one weird moment of clarity for everything I’d ever read and heard to fall into place.)

I just had to borrow the heck out of the people I knew in real life.

It only took a minute or two longer to identify someone in real life who shared traits with Pitney, ask myself what they would do under the circumstances, and waltz past my writer’s block.

Now, I start with someone I know. I still consider the genre, plot, and world needs I’m addressing when sketching out my characters, but I immediately choose a real person who at least shares some core traits. Even if I know I want the final product to stray far from the source, or be a composite of multiple people, I ground my inspiration in reality.

So what kind of things do I steal from my friends, family, coworkers, and mortal enemies?

Their mannerisms. So much about how a person uses their physical presence tells you about their personality and motivations. The way they walk, the way they sit. Their ticks and tells. How they shrink into themselves or expand outward when surrounded by an audience. The specific ways they gesture when they speak; their personal sign language. A list of all of the little aspects of body language and paralinguistics might go on forever, and each one you add to your character is a tiny brushstroke of relatability.

Their physical traits. You can directly rip off entire descriptions of people you know, but risk of “resemblance to real people” aside, I think the best characters are composites. They’re the kind of people who make your reader say, I know someone just like this! But I do advise snagging especially striking physical details from your dear friends and frenemies, and mixing them with less notable details from others for a realistic blend.

Their speaking styles. My dad has a peculiar way of butchering common phrases (“You couldn’t hit a brick!” is a family favorite); I’d recognize it anywhere. Take these tendencies to mis-speak, repeat certain words, lay the catch phrases on thick, drop into phony accents, and invent colorful swears… and watch your dialog perk up and come to life.

Theirreactions. People don’t all grieve the same way. They don’t all process anger in the same way. They react to times of self-doubt, hunger of the soul, or intense joy differently from one another. In the interest of “show don’t tell,” watching how those around you uniquely express their strongest emotions will give you more to say than, “He grieved deeply,” or, “She was gripped by a deep joy.”

Their secrets. Some secrets would be dark to anyone, but the little secrets one person is desperate to keep are simply the daily routine for someone else. (For instance: a “secret” of my own I’ve often given my characters is a fear of water + darkness. Not such a juicy secret for a writer, but could be a great secret for a world-class diving instructor…) Collecting these from people you know gives you a good variety of shameful and silly. Caution: you must be very gentle when stealing someone’s secrets, lest you pin them on their keeper in the public square. If you’re going to use someone’s secret that you know about, make everything else about the character you give it to different from the real secret-bearer.

Their personal histories. What was her first job? Where did he have his first kiss? Who gave them the advice that catapulted their career? Where someone comes from, their formative experiences and the places they come from… these things can really inform how someone presents, thinks, speaks, and acts in the present.

Their family relationships. Depending on the family, it represents a juicy source of conflict or a solid grounding force in someone’s life; comedy gold, or a ball-and-chain tragedy. Choose a genuine family dynamic you know and can observe, and draw from their interactions to inform your character’s relationships with their own family members. Figure out who advises whom and whose praise is impossible to win. Jot down the kinds of conversations held over an ordinary dinner or a holiday dinner.

Their Meyers-Briggs profiles. This last one is a tried-and-true technique I use to quickly draw the “boundaries” around a new character. Once I’ve picked someone I know who shares some traits on the above lists with my character, I then take a free Meyers-Briggs personality test as if I were the other person. I answer the questions the way I imagine they would answer them. Then, using the results, I browse the myriad web resources on Meyers-Briggs personality types, which give me a sense of the strengths, weaknesses, communication styles, and conflict management techniques I should give my character.

Not so long ago, we Damn Shames took on an interesting project that lasted about a year. We love writing about digital spaceships, and so when a client wanted us to make some buyer’s guide-style content for their website using Star Citizen game assets and our imaginations, we went for it.

First, we created something we thought the client might like and sent it off for feedback. Then we incorporated the feedback and got the first final product approved for text and images. At that point, knowing that I would be one of two writers on the project, I set out to make a template we could both follow.

I took that first product, knowing what the client liked about it and what we should emphasize going forward, and sketched out a basic template: introduction, elevator pitch, physical description, full sales pitch, anecdotes, and conclusion. I knew that structure had produced a successful outcome, and it was broad enough to be applied across a spectrum of spaceship styles.

From there on out, the other writer and I leaned heavily on that template. We used it to sketch out what we needed to deliver every two weeks. Every guide we produced felt tailored to that specific ship – but overall they felt like they all belonged to the same series. And we always knew what was left in the project.

Much like the five-paragraph essay format, a “cheatsheet” like this gives you a comfortable structure to fall back on when you just can’t pull something truly creative out of your ass. It’s okay if you don’t always feel original. Life – and writing in particular, I think – falls into a set of familiar tropes for a reason: people like when something feels right. You don’t have to be lazy – just learn when to rely on a formula that works.

Paid writers get repetitive projects. It’s not a sin to make yourself a cheatsheet. I look at it this way: any time I can free up in my paid writing process, I can spend on my creative writing. (Does that always happen? Nah.)

Here’s how I suggest going about making your own repetitive project cheatsheet:

Make at least one that you’re happy with (or that your client is happy with). Set it aside for a few days.

Go back through the piece and mark out its basic structure. What elements hold it together and make it work? Look for repeatable patterns and distinguishable segments.

Write up the template. Make sure you have examples or explanations where necessary, especially if others will be using the same cheatsheet.

Copy it each time you want to start a new project so you don’t have to begin with a blank page!

Whoops, it’s the 19th, and I haven’t updated for Camp NaNo at all. I posted on Facebook a bit, but…I’ve put more of my attention on other projects this month and didn’t get as far as I’d hoped.

But, so far this has been a really fun project! The book is turning out how I want it to, at least so far – which is about 13k words. It should be pretty short and sweet, and probably won’t fall far outside NaNo’s typical 50k-word threshold (she said, and it was famous last words as usual).

Funny, for how big the story itself is, I don’t think I’ll need a ton of words to tell it. Which is good, since I’m aiming to do this, uh, eight more times? Just in this series?

I’m going to camp! Camp NaNoWriMo, anyway. (NaNoWriMo, for those who aren’t in on the joke, is a friendly global contest to get writers over their inability to cruise through a first draft and on their way to a finished manuscript, in 30 days.)

I’m taking on the standard 50,000-word goal; I’m feeling boring, and plus, I just want enough motivation to get past that inevitable 30k-word hump. Not sure yet if I’ll finish the story but it’s worth a shot – this ought to be a fast-paced novel anyway.

I’m going to be using techniques I gleaned from several books, because they were successful for me in structuring and finishing Daugment, and because I’m trying to break into a very specific type of writing (production rather than art). I’m combining tricks and checklists from:

I highly recommend all three books, though Fox’s “Write to Market” is definitely not for people who write books for artistic reasons. (It’s about finding a niche you’ll enjoy churning out slightly cliché books for, not channeling your innermost beliefs to realize your magnum opus.)

If you’d like to follow my progress closely, you can watch me on the Camp NaNoWriMo site. I intend to post semi-regular updates on how it’s going, especially since I plan to use word sprints the entire time, something I’ve never done for a novel before!

My favorite writing exercise of all time is from Ray Bradbury, in Zen in the Art of Writing. It’s very simple: you generate a list of nouns, conjured from your life experiences, as if they were titles. Bradbury always did this exercise in all-caps, and so do I; it makes the results feel more title-like, therefore conjuring sensations rather than simply specific images. How ominous does THE BLACKENED TRUCK sound? How mysterious is THE GEM SHOP?

If this sounds intriguing, I highly recommend reading the entirety of Zen for yourself!

Despite all of the genius ideas locked away in those childhood nouns, I was recently very, very stuck. To call it writer’s block would be putting it mildly; it was more like writer’s constipation, a time of deep drought. I was sure I’d never come up with another good, heartfelt idea ever again.

So one day, I threw up my hands and put a twist on Bradbury’s exercise. And it worked. It got me past my mental block.

I call it Cool Things to Write About™.

It’s a self-explanatory exercise: You sit down with a piece of paper. You write “Cool Things to Write About™” at the top of the page. Underneath, you list cool things to write about.

Not cool as in people around the world love reading about these things cool. Cool to you. Cool because little you, the still-excited nerd child inside you, thinks they’re wicked cool. Thinks they’ll always be cool. Guess what? They are. To you. That’s all that matters. If you think it’s cool, I promise, there’s a way to sell it.

Don’t hold back. Write everything down that comes to mind as you stare at the title. When you’re done, the list of Cool Things to Write About™ should start to stir up your inspiration. Consider them in pairs. Contemplate the connections between them, the potential energy they bring to one another.

Dinosaurs and telepathy? Charmed objects and sailing into the unknown? Alien planets and practical magic?

Almost-authors are people with projects the world hasn’t seen yet. They might be a few drafts or just a few cover letters away from being a published author…for the first or the tenth time. They haven’t made it to the finish line yet on this one – but I’m going to find out how they plan to get there.

Eva Gibson is an author of contemporary YA, who is drawn to dark stories for both consumptive and creative purposes. When she’s not inflicting Dante-levels of emotional turmoil on her characters, she’s inflicting said turmoil upon herself, in her quest to balance writing with parenting. Eva is represented by Christa Heschke of McIntosh & Otis.

August Writes a Book: So tell me what makes you an almost-author. (Or at least, as much as your agent will let you.)

Eva Gibson: I am currently working on four dark contemporary Young Adult novels – one is on submission, one is in the revision stage, and two are unfinished first drafts.

August: What kind of publishing are you pursuing?

Eva: Traditional publishing.

August: What’s the biggest roadblock standing between you and publication?

Eva: I wouldn’t call it a roadblock so much as a step: getting my work in front of the right eyes. Rejection is a huge part of the publication process, from querying on up, and everything is subjective.

I was lucky—I found an agent who loves my writing enough to work with me through draft after draft. Once revisions are done, the next step is to find the right editor or publisher who loves it just as much. That’s where I am at the moment.

August: What have been your specific strategies to get past the roadblocks in your way?

Eva: Working on projects simultaneously, switching between narrative voices, and prioritizing my time to meet my goals. I have small children, so the only (mostly) uninterrupted free time I have to write is after they’re in bed for the night. So that’s what I do – once they’re down, I get to work. Since I have such a small window, I have to be very disciplined about writing every single night, in order to get as much done as I can. The only strategy for that is to just sit down and do it.

I write until it’s time for bed, and then I check my work for clarity and clean it up a bit in the morning. As for simultaneous projects, I work on whichever one is furthest along in the draft process – revisions based on agent feedback, for instance, take priority over new material.

August: What’s been the most obnoxious roadblock in the course of your process?

Eva: The writer’s ego, otherwise known as the worst possible gauge. I can write ten pages I think are absolute genius, then blink at them the next morning and wonder why I ever thought they were anything but an utter mess. Luckily, I have excellent critique partners to steer me and help me steer myself.

Dramatic, right? But ask anyone who knows me, and they’ll tell you it’s accurate. Many of my literary models of heroism and virtue were people who ran on four legs, not two. Even now, I can’t get away from writing talking animals (case in point: my novel Daugment).

Looking critically at which childhood stories have stuck with me, I’ve found several other reasons why a talking animal makes an incredibly powerful storytelling tool.

Talking animals allow the reader to practice empathy for radically different perspectives. I often re-read Watership Downbecause of how deftly Adams makes me care about the very rabbit-centric plight of his rabbit characters. And yet – it’s a very humanizing story, every reading of which reveals more layered nuance about our stewardship of the Earth, our treatment of marginalized people, and our own personal heroic journeys.

Complex concepts can become subconsciously absorbed, thanks to the inherent simplification of animal characters. Author Clare Bell (of The Named series) used prehistoric cats and primates to illustrate consider the implications of civilization and technology. The fierce, impulsive hunter nature of cats and the meeker disposition of monkeys allowed her to pare away the complexity of social explorations and address them in a bare, simple way that I could understand even as a young reader.

Traits worth emulating are easier to identify and understand through animals. A non-human character is automatically “other,” and so to portray them as being defined by some positive or negative trait still felt honest (I was and am very sensitive to disingenuous prose). Talking animal characters, like Martin the Warrior of Brian Jacques’s Redwall series, can be nuanced but still defined by their leadership, compassion, selflessness, sacrifice, perseverance… I saw the behaviors in these characters that added up to those traits, and found it simple to understand what those traits were, what it meant to embody them, and how I could emulate them.

Animals free you up to write with less risk. I can choose an animal for its stereotypical characteristics and assign it traits of a friend or family member – and process what I needed to process without fear they would identify themselves in an opossum or a dragon. By transforming the people in my life into creatures, I hold them at a slight distance in my stories, and am able to gain perspective on both my own feelings and the other person’s behavior.

Today, I still find ways to sneak talking animals into my stories. Daugment is all about a man-turned-dog, and I decided Pitney would become a beagle-basset because I wanted him to face the inherent indignity in becoming a “bagel hound.” Without touching any human stereotypes, I’m able to use the power of stereotypes to set up some crucial details early on.

I’ve seen the Living Computer Museum‘s neon green sign fly past for five years now, and only this weekend did we stop in. And thank god we did. What a trip.

It seems modest enough at first, though as delightful as you might expect – all neon and big displays and the bright colors you’d expect of an exhibit on modern technological superpowers, like self-driving cars, virtual reality, and big data. There was a display on Barbie’s influence on women in tech, a digital studio section, and an old Cray unit. All very cool.

But then we went upstairs, to the living computers.

We all pulled out our smartphones in awe, to take some 20+ megapixel photos we could instantly share with people we felt like sharing them to.

And I immediately thought, How quickly we take it all for granted.

The sounds! The recent past was a constant tapestry of high-pitched whines, whirring fans and hard drives, clattering keyboards and ka-chunking switches. Somehow we lived and worked beside that sound, day after day of it singing through our brains.

The time it took to complete simple tasks now seems staggering. Back then it was the latest, the quickest, the newest. Something to compare to what your friends’ families had.

I walked from thrumming machine to stuttering screen, in awe of human ingenuity. And so much of what I saw at the museum was predicted in some form by speculative authors. The imaginations that play with the future shape the future.

How far and how fast we’ve come, how accelerated our acceptance of change. How young and unprepared so many of the icons were: Bill and Paul and the Steves, especially. I saw photos of Bill Gates in high school, looking 13, his hands on a keyboard. (Where else?)

Yet with every decade of silicon I wandered past, I wondered, how many times now have we faced the same questions and assumed the answers would be different, because “the world is so different now”?

It’s really not. The world is never different. Nature goes on, with or without us. The tools we’ve got to contend with the dull parts, those change a lot. But the things about a life that make stories timeless, the struggles and the triumphs and the quiet happiness, those don’t go away.

If we keep thinking our tools will change the world, we’ll keep making the same mistakes.